Used vs Operate - What's the difference?
used | operate |
(use)
* 1948 , , North from Mexico / The Spanish-Speaking People of The United States , J. B. Lippincott Company, page 75
(intransitive, as an auxiliary verb, now only in past tense) to perform habitually; to be accustomed [to doing something]
That is or has or have been used.
* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-08-03, volume=408, issue=8847, magazine=(The Economist)
, title= That has or have previously been owned by someone else.
Familiar through use; usual; accustomed.
* 1965 , (Bob Dylan), (Like a Rolling Stone)
(transitive, or, intransitive) To perform a work or labour; to exert power or strength, physical or mechanical; to act.
(transitive, or, intransitive) To produce an appropriate physical effect; to issue in the result designed by nature; especially (medicine) to take appropriate effect on the human system.
(transitive, or, intransitive) To act or produce effect on the mind; to exert moral power or influence.
* Atterbury
* Jonathan Swift
To perform some manual act upon a human body in a methodical manner, and usually with instruments, with a view to restore soundness or health, as in amputation, lithotomy, etc.
(transitive, or, intransitive) To deal in stocks or any commodity with a view to speculative profits.
(transitive, or, intransitive) To produce, as an effect; to cause.
* {{quote-magazine, date=2012-01, author=Robert L. Dorit, volume=100, issue=1, page=23
, magazine=
, title= (transitive, or, intransitive) To put into, or to continue in, operation or activity; to work.
* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-14, author=(Jonathan Freedland)
, volume=189, issue=1, page=18, magazine=(The Guardian Weekly)
, title=
As verbs the difference between used and operate
is that used is (use) while operate is (transitive|or|intransitive) to perform a work or labour; to exert power or strength, physical or mechanical; to act.As an adjective used
is that is or has or have been used.used
English
Verb
(head)- In 1866 Colonel J. F. Meline noted that the rebozo had almost disappeared in Santa Fe and that hoop skirts, on sale in the stores, were being widely used .
- You used me!
- He used to live here, but moved away last year.
Adjective
(en adjective)Boundary problems, passage=Economics is a messy discipline: too fluid to be a science, too rigorous to be an art. Perhaps it is fitting that economists’ most-used metric, gross domestic product (GDP), is a tangle too. GDP measures the total value of output in an economic territory. Its apparent simplicity explains why it is scrutinised down to tenths of a percentage point every month.}}
- Nobody's ever taught you how to live out on the street and now you're gonna have to get used to it.
Synonyms
* (having been used) * (previously owned by someone else) pre-owned, second-handAntonyms
* (having been used) unused * (previously owned by someone else) newDerived terms
* usedness * well-usedSee also
* used toStatistics
*Anagrams
* English heteronymsoperate
English
Verb
(operat)- The virtues of private persons operate but on a few.
- A plain, convincing reason operates on the mind both of a learned and ignorant hearer as long as they live.
Rereading Darwin, passage=We live our lives in three dimensions for our threescore and ten allotted years. Yet every branch of contemporary science, from statistics to cosmology, alludes to processes that operate on scales outside of human experience: the millisecond and the nanometer, the eon and the light-year.}}
- to operate a machine
Obama's once hip brand is now tainted, passage=Now we are liberal with our innermost secrets, spraying them into the public ether with a generosity our forebears could not have imagined. Where we once sent love letters in a sealed envelope, or stuck photographs of our children in a family album, now such private material is despatched to servers and clouds operated by people we don't know and will never meet.}}
